Ege Yumusak in The Point:
The starkest, most disquieting scene from the film was printed on postcards and handed out at the door. We picked up our postcards as we hurried into the theater to secure our seats. My eyes widened: a group of women in burqas sat on a beach facing the ocean. Before them stood a woman with dark hair—uncovered—wearing a long, flowing white dress as she faced the women in the burqas. I began mentally preparing for the ideological and cultural translations—and mistranslations—I might be in for by the end of the movie, when we would inevitably run into acquaintances and friends in the foyer.
The director was privy to the provocations of her film, Leila and the Wolves. “This film offended everyone,” she proudly told the packed room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, at a screening last spring. When the movie came out in the Eighties, everybody, including those on the left, could find something to be offended by in it. Her films were deemed insufficiently feminist for being full of guns, while at the same time criticized for “overemphasizing” women’s liberation in comparison to imperialism. Now her films could finally resume their provocations: since last spring, the “eighty-springs-young” director, Heiny Srour, has toured Europe, the U.K. and the U.S., screening new restorations of her masterpieces The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974) and Leila and the Wolves (1984), thanks to programmers determined to bring her provocative socialist feminist oeuvre to wider audiences (a destiny all too rare in the history of Global South cinema). But this time around, especially in the West, she has found the political engagement with her work to be lacking. “In France, they shower me in praises,” Srour complained. Praise is boring. Trained as a sociologist, she wants her films to spark arguments.
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Amazon knows everything you’ve ever bought. They could build an incredibly sophisticated profile of who you are and what you want and even what you need.
Scientists report that a type of
“Somehow all of the interesting energy for discussions about the long-range future of humanity is concentrated on the right,”
In 1963, famed American photographer
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
Researchers have been mapping the brain for more than a century. By tracing cellular patterns that are visible under a microscope, they’ve created colorful charts and models that delineate regions and have been able to associate them with functions. In recent years, they’ve added vastly greater detail: They can now go cell by cell and define each one by its internal genetic activity. But no matter how carefully they slice and how deeply they analyze, their maps of the brain seem incomplete, muddled, inconsistent. For example, some large brain regions have been linked to many different tasks; scientists suspect that they should be subdivided into smaller regions, each with its own job. So far, mapping these cellular neighborhoods from enormous genetic datasets has been both a challenge and a chore.
Zero-sum bias refers to the tendency to believe that anything gained by one side is lost by the other when in fact win-win outcomes are available. Prior research has documented the bias in several domains but little is known about what triggers it. As politics is a hotbed of zero-sum beliefs, we hypothesized that politicizing problems would act as either a situational trigger or inhibitor for partisans and that this would lead them to propose qualitatively different solutions. We report five studies that find evidence for our hypotheses. We demonstrate that Democrats find less-effective solutions to a problem when it is framed in terms of corporate tax cuts, and more-effective solutions when a formally identical problem is framed in terms of pro-immigration policies, than when it is framed non-politically. Republicans exhibit the opposite pattern. Thus, we find differential problem-solving performance between the two political groups only in the politicized problem frames. We show that the political frames interfere with the process of problem solving per se, as opposed to rendering some solutions socially inadmissible. We also show that this interference impacts participants not by dialing up or down the effort they put in, but by constraining their way of thinking about the space of possible solutions. Finally, we demonstrate that the outcome of the problem-solving process is predicted by the presence or absence of zero-sum beliefs about the particular political frame, but not by participants’ affective response to it.